US Politics

Amazon’s sales increased 44% to $108.5bn in the first three months of the year as the company’s pandemic boom continued into 2021.The sales figures from the online shopping and web services giant came after the release of slew of positive economic reports that suggest the US is shaking off the worst of the pandemic recession.Amazon made a profit of $8.1bn for the quarter – $2.7bn a month – beating analysts’ forecasts after a series of better than expected results from tech companies and others.While Amazon profited throughout the coronavirus downturn, there are now signs that the economic recovery is spreading.The news came after the commerce department said the US economy took off in the first quarter, soaring 6.4% on an annual basis as rising vaccinations, a massive round of government stimulus and a steady recovery in the jobs market helped reverse some of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.The annualized rate suggests the US economy is firmly on the road to recovery. In normal times US gross domestic product (GDP) – the broadest measure of the economy – grows at about 2-2.5% a year, but the pandemic triggered wild swings as the country went into lockdown and businesses shuttered.The news comes amid a flood of good news for the US economy. The corporate earnings season has seen many sectors of the economy from banking to automotive bouncing back from the pandemic. Apple too reported bumper results on Tuesday, the latest tech company to record booming sales during the pandemic. New York City, the center of the US pandemic last year, will fully reopen on 1 July, while 43% of the population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and more than a quarter of the US is now fully vaccinated.US stock markets set record highs again after the GDP report and copper prices, seen as key indicator of economic demand, rose to $10,000 a tonne for the first time since 2011.The outpouring of good news is all the more remarkable given the scale of economic woe the pandemic heaped on the US economy.A year ago US unemployment hit a post-second world war high of 14.8%, it has since fallen to 6%. The economy suffered its worst quarterly contraction in history last year, shrinking 32.9% on an annualized basis. It grew at 4.3% in the last three months of 2020 after recording a remarkable annual growth rate of 33.4% in the previous three months.“The increase in first-quarter GDP reflected the continued economic recovery, reopening of establishments, and continued government response related to the Covid-19 pandemic,” the commerce department said.Problems remain, the number of people filing for unemployment benefits each week is still high. On Thursday the labor department said 553,000 people filed for benefits last week. The number has been falling sharply but remains close to twice as high as pre-pandemic levels and the jobs market is still down 8.4m jobs.Racial disparities also remain. Black and Latino Americans suffered the hardest as the pandemic closed businesses across the US and their unemployment rates remain elevated in comparison with white Americans. Women, too, have been pushed out of the workforce by the shutdowns, triggering what some economists have dubbed a “shecession”. Lack of childcare and other issues have meant that 1.8 million women have left the workforce entirely.But the fast rollout of vaccines, the reopening of businesses and the Biden administration’s $1.9tn stimulus bill have boosted consumer confidence and fueled an impressive recovery.The US government sent cheques to 90 million Americans in March and consumer confidence is approaching pre-pandemic levels having risen for four months in a row. Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of US economic activity.Consumption growth surged 10.7% over the quarter and the US savings rate grew to 21.0% from 13.0%. Capital Economics expects those savers to start spending now that Covid-19 restrictions are lifting.“With the elevated saving rate, households are still flush with cash and, now that restrictions are being eased as the vaccination program proves a success, that will allow them to boost spending on the worst-affected services, without needing to pull back too much on goods spending,” the economic forecasting group wrote in a note to investors. More

Transgender women and girls will be banned from participating in school sports in Florida, if the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signs what critics call a “cruel and horrific” bill rushed through by state legislators in a controversial late-night session.The politicians revived, then passed, the bill that prohibits trans athletes competing in high school and college sports in short order on Wednesday, employing what opponents have called “shady, backroom tactics” to bind it to unrelated legislation on charter schools.A previous, standalone bill passed the Florida house earlier this month, but died in the state senate after warnings from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) that it would not stage championship games and tournaments in states with discriminatory policies.“It’s horrific,” said Gina Duncan, the director of transgender equality at Equality Florida. “This bill shows not only their lack of humanity but their astounding ignorance about the transgender community, not understanding that trans girls are girls and transgender women are women.“Despite impassioned pleas by legislators who have gay and transgender kids and grandkids imploring supporters of this bill to understand the harm that it will do, Republicans followed their marching orders to implement this orchestrated culture war and move this bill forward.”The move in Florida, where both chambers are controlled by Republicans, is part of a wave of anti-trans legislation sweeping across the nation, with dozens of measures proposed or passed in numerous states.Earlier this month, Asa Hutchison, the governor of Arkansas, vetoed a state law banning gender-confirming treatments for trans youth – which the state legislature immediately overturned.Joe Biden reacted to the Republican anti-trans push in his first joint address to Congress on Wednesday night. “To all transgender Americans watching at home, especially the young people: you’re so brave. I want you to know your president has your back,” he said.The House of Representatives passed the landmark Equality Act in February, but it faces an uncertain future in the equally divided Senate.The sponsor of Florida’s original trans-sports bill, the state representative Kaylee Tuck, told colleagues the law was necessary because trans athletes had an unfair advantage in women’s athletic competitions. “We don’t need to wait until there’s a problem in Florida for us to act,” she said, acknowledging that there was no evidence of the issue causing problems in the state.Both the NCAA and the Florida high school athletic association have policies that allow trans athletes to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity, and opponents of the new bill say it would result in girls being kicked off those teams.“This cruel legislation is creating an issue where one doesn’t exist, picking on young people for political gain,” Charlie Crist, a Democratic US congressman and Florida’s former governor, said in a statement that called on DeSantis to veto the bill.“I challenge Republican legislators in Tallahassee to imagine being a kid who is in this situation, what it says to them to be singled out by lawmakers in such a mean-spirited way.”Crist said he had a different message for every trans kid in Florida. “You are welcome here and you are loved. And millions of Floridians feel the same way as I do. We’re ready to fight for your right to play and live as exactly who you are.”The earlier version of the bill, which passed the Florida House 77-40 on 14 April, contained a dispute resolution clause that would have allowed a school to inspect the genitals of any athlete subject to a complaint. The amended version of the bill passed by the Florida senate allowed scrutiny of a student’s birth certificate to suffice.“We are told it’s a compromise because we’re no longer inspecting the genitals of children in schools,” the Democratic house representative Carlos Guillermo Smith, who identifies as LGBTQ, said on Wednesday during the house debate. “Members, not inspecting children’s genitals is not a compromise.”Duncan, the Equality Florida activist, said opponents will lobby DeSantis to reject the bill.“It’s terribly harmful to our transgender young people, and there will be substantive revenue drains from passing this bill because the NCAA has made it very clear that they are going to be collaborating with states that do not discriminate, that are inclusive and welcoming for all,” she said.“Economic recovery from the pandemic is so critical to states and to the country. Instead of focusing on that, and on how we provide funding to support people, feed people and house people, we’re passing a bill to discriminate against transgender young people?”DeSantis has not indicated if he will sign the bill. The governor was heavily criticized in 2019 for omitting from a remembrance proclamation that many of the 49 victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando came from the LGBTQ+ community.Staffers blamed it on a mistake and the proclamation was reissued. More

The White House has said it is investigating “unexplained health incidents” after a report that two US officials in the Washington area experienced sudden symptoms similar to the “Havana syndrome” symptoms suffered by American diplomats and spies abroad.The wave of mysterious brain injuries, beginning in Cuba in 2016, are deemed by the National Academy of Scientists to be most likely the result of some form of directed energy device, and the CIA, state department and Pentagon have all launched investigations.CNN reported on Thursday that two possible incidents on US soil are part of the investigation. One took place in November last year near the Ellipse, the large oval lawn on the south side of the White House, in which an official from the national security council suddenly fell sick.The other was in 2019 and involved a White House official walking her dog in a Arlington suburb of Washington. That incident was reported in GQ magazine last year.That account said the incident happened after the staffer went past a parked van and a man got out and walked past her.“Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face,” the report said.Officials cautioned that the investigations into these and other incidents have not reached a conclusion.“The health and wellbeing of American public servants is a paramount priority for the Biden administration. We take all reports of health incidents by our personnel extremely seriously,” a White House spokesperson said.“The White House is working closely with departments and agencies to address unexplained health incidents and ensure the safety and security of Americans serving around the world. Given that we are still evaluating reported incidents and that we need to protect the privacy of individuals reporting incidents, we cannot provide or confirm specific details at this time.”The symptoms of the Havana syndrome attacks include hearing strange sounds followed by dizziness, nausea, severe headaches and loss of memory which in some case can go on for years. There are dozens of victims, most of whom were stationed in Cuba and China with a handful of cases elsewhere.Most of those affected, as well as many officials and experts, believed they were attacked by a foreign power with some form of microwave energy device. But they fought an uphill struggle, before the National Academy of Sciences study in December, convincing their employers that their brain injuries were the result of an attack while they were on assignment.The CIA set up a taskforce in December, and the new CIA director, William Burns, has appointed a senior official to coordinate both care of those affected and to investigate the origins of the attacks.While the inquiries are continuing, the administration has not confirmed whether the injuries suffered were the result of a weapon, the national security council senior director for the western hemisphere, Juan Gonzalez, referred to microwave attacks in Cuba, in an interview with CNN Spanish language service earlier this month. More

Republican reaction to Joe Biden’s first congressional speech on Thursday centered as much on what the new president was perceived to have omitted as much as the policy proposals he did lay out.“He didn’t discuss the border and the fact that tens of thousands of people are pouring into our country,” former president Donald Trump said during a morning appearing on Fox News’ Mornings with Maria, seizing on a familiar grievance.“It’s out of control. It could destroy our country.” (Biden did, in fact, address immigration, and his proposed plan for border issues and paths to citizenship.)The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs was another to criticize Biden for not addressing the situation at the southern border, which has seen migrant apprehensions surge.“That is the worst crisis that America is facing today and I was sorely disappointed that the president did not take that on,” he told Fox & Friends.Biggs said Biden “was more methodical and not as dramatic or energetic” as Trump was while delivering his final address to Congress last year, but praised elements of the speech.“When he started talking about the need to end forever wars, and getting us out of Afghanistan, that was good. When he started talking about being competitive with China and we need to buy America, support America, those things, on narrative messaging point, were right on the money,” he said.“However, his policy statements affiliated with those things are dubious. You can’t throw $6tn in spending out the door as quickly as they want to do, we just don’t have the money for that. Taxes will have to go up across the board.”It was Biden’s ambitious social agenda, and accompanying price tag, that led senior Republicans to frame Biden’s address as a “bait and switch” operation“He talks like a moderate but is governing to satisfy the far left,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said, according to the Kentucky Courier Journal, rehashing a favored Republican talking point.“I think the storyline on the Biden administration, underscored by the president’s speech tonight, could best be described as bait and switch. The bait was that he was going to be a moderate, a unifying force, and bring us all together. The switch is that Bernie Sanders, for all practical purposes, won the debate in the Democratic party over what it ought to look like.”The perceived lack of a unifying message was the main topic of the South Carolina senator Tim Scott’s rebuttal, the only Black Republican in the chamber insisting that: “The actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”Predictably, Scott’s performance drew praise from Trump, who said: “I thought Tim Scott last night was fantastic. I thought he did an incredible job.” More

Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,During Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office, there are few issues more pressing than the escalating attack on the right to vote in America. Democrats may be running out of time to address it.As Republicans have pushed more than 360 bills across the country to restrict access to the ballot, the president and Democrats have strongly condemned those efforts, but they’ve been unable to stop them. Even though Democrats control both chambers of Congress in Washington, they can’t pass a sweeping voting rights bill because they don’t have enough votes to get rid of the filibuster, an arcane senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation. A showdown over the filibuster has loomed over the first 100 days of the Biden administration, but during the next 100 days, it’s clear that a showdown over getting rid of the procedure is unavoidable.Amanda Litman, the executive director of the Run for Something, a group that recruits candidates for state legislative races, told me this week she thinks some Democrats still don’t fully appreciate how dangerous and consequential the GOP’s ongoing efforts are. “This is really an existential crisis. It’s a five-alarm fire. But I’m not sure it’s quite sunk in for members of the United States Senate or the Democratic party writ large,” she told me.“If the Senate does not kill the filibuster and pass voting rights reforms … Democrats are going to lose control of the House and likely the Senate forever. You don’t put these worms back into a can. You can’t undo this quite easily,” she added.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, last week set August as a deadline for Democrats to pass their sweeping voting rights bill, which would require early voting, automatic and same-day registration, among other measures. Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, said the White House supports that effort.But the window for Democrats to have the most impact with their legislation is rapidly closing. The decennial process of redrawing district lines is set to take place later this year, and a critical portion of the Democratic bill would set new limits to prevent state lawmakers, who have the power to draw the maps, from severely manipulating districts for partisan gain. While it’s probably already too late to set up independent redistricting commissions for this year, Democrats could still pass rules to prevent the most severe partisan manipulation.“You could pass new criteria, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering…require greater transparency in the process,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “There’s a lot that could be done.”I also asked the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who chairs the Senate committee currently considering the bill, what kind of message it would send if Democrats failed to take any action to protect voting rights while they held the reins of government. “Failure is not an option,” she said, adding she wasn’t going to let the filibuster stand in the way.“This is our very democracy that’s at stake,” she said. “I’m not gonna let some old senate rule get in the way of that.”Also worth watching …
My colleague Tom Perkins and I reported on a particularly anti-democratic effort underway in Michigan, where Republicans have already hinted they plan to utilize a little-used maneuver to get around a gubernatorial veto and enact voting restrictions.
The Census Bureau announced its long-awaited apportionment totals on Monday that determine which states gain and lose seats in Congress. Colorado, Montana, Oregon, North Carolina, and Florida will all gain a seat and Texas will add two. California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will all lose a seat. More

Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe next major fight over voting rights in the US kicked off Monday: a hugely consequential battle over the boundaries of electoral districts for the next 10 years that will have profound implications for American politics. And Republicans seem to be pulling ahead.Census officials released a decennial tally of people living in the US, a number that’s used to apportion the House’s 435 seats among the 50 states. The Census Bureau announced that Colorado, Montana, Oregon, North Carolina and Florida will all gain an additional seat in the House, while Texas will get two more. Seven states – California, California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia – will lose a seat.The numbers accentuated what many have predicted for months: Republicans are extremely well positioned to draw districts that will give them an advantage both in their effort to reclaim control of the US House in the 2022 midterms, and cement control over congressional seats for the next decade.The constitution gives state lawmakers the power to draw districts and, because of their continued strength in state legislative races, Republicans will dominate the process later this year and can manipulate the lines to their advantage, a process often called gerrymandering.Even though Democrats earned about 4.7m more votes in 2020 House races around the country, Republicans will have control over the drawing of 187 congressional districts later this year (down from 219 in 2011) while Democrats will have complete control over the drawing of 75 districts (up from 44 a decade ago), according to the Cook Political Report.Republicans need to win just five seats to retake control of the US House of Representatives, a gap observers believe they can wipe out with gerrymandering alone. Eric Holder, the former US attorney general, told reporters Wednesday he was concerned Republicans could use their complete control of the redistricting process in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina alone to overcome that gap.“What we’re seeing is a Republican party that has shown they’re willing to bend or break the rules of democracy simply to hold on to power,” said Holder, who is leading the Democratic effort to push back on excessive GOP gerrymandering. “If Republicans gerrymander those states, as they have indicated they will, they will have the ability there, almost to take control of the House of Representatives just based on what they do in those four states.”In 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that federal courts could not do anything to stop severe manipulation of district lines for partisan gain. One lingering uncertainty is whether Democrats in Congress will be able to pass pending federal legislation to place new limits on the practice. Passing that legislation, however, requires getting rid of the filibuster, a Senate rule requiring 60 votes to advance legislation. Democrats do not yet have the votes to get rid of the procedure.“You could pass new criteria, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering … require greater transparency in the process,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There’s a lot that could be done.”Because of a 2013 supreme court ruling, states with a history of voting discrimination, like Texas and North Carolina, will not have to get their maps approved by the federal government before they go into effect. That leaves an opportunity for lawmakers to draw maps that discriminate based on race. Kathay Feng, the national redistricting and representation director at Common Cause, a government watchdog group, warned that voting advocates would be closely monitoring for that kind of discrimination. Much of the America’s population growth over the last decade has come from non-white people.“Our top priority is ensuring that states that are adding congressional seats recognize the population growth fueled by communities of color in the upcoming redistricting process,” Feng said in a statement.As federal legislation stalls, Democrats are already signaling they will move aggressively in court to challenge gerrymandering. Shortly after the apportionment numbers were released, Holder’s group filed three separate lawsuits in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Louisiana – states where Democrats and Republicans share control of the redistricting process – asking courts to be prepared to step in if lawmakers reach an impasse. Such quick machinations are crucial because the redistricting process is moving on a condensed timeline this year because of delays releasing data due to the Covid-19 pandemic.Marc Elias, a top Democratic election lawyer, said this week more lawsuits are likely to follow.While the Republicans made possible gains, the biggest surprise of the Census Bureau’s Monday’s announcement was that it didn’t result in more of a shift for the party. Projections based on population estimates had predicted Texas would gain three seats and Florida would gain two. Arizona, where districts are drawn by an independent commission, was expected to gain a seat, but ended up not doing so. Minnesota and Rhode Island were both projected to lose seats, and New York could have lost an additional seat.“Overall, the population shifts to the the south will definitely benefit Republicans, but definitely not as much as people were expecting, just because they got fewer seats,” Li said.It’s not unusual for the final tallies to be slightly off from apportionment, but Li said he was surprised to see the kind of variation there was this year. There is some concern that the variation in the data may signal an undercount of Hispanic population, especially after the Trump administration repeatedly tried to tamper with the process. Bureau officials said Monday they are confident in the data.Holder told reporters on Tuesday that it was impossible to separate the upcoming battle over redistricting from an aggressive GOP effort underway in state legislatures to restrict access to the voting booth.“I have no doubt that the same Republican legislators that have pushed these bills will now try and use the redistricting process to illegitimately lock in power for that party, for them, for the next decade,” he said. More

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri accuses the US’s biggest tech companies of committing the “gravest threat to American liberty since the monopolies of the Gilded age” in his upcoming book. He rails that tech giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook “have become a techno-oligarchy with overwhelming economic and political power”.Hawley has also invested potentially tens of thousands of dollars in the very companies he denounces, according to public financial disclosure records examined by the Guardian.Hawley’s new book, The Tyranny of Big Tech, is published next week by Regnery Publishing. Simon & Schuster, its original publisher, dropped the book following the Missouri senator’s involvement in the 6 January electoral college vote certifying Joe Biden’s election.In the book Hawley compares today’s tech titans to the “robber baron” industrialists who dominated the US economy in the 19th century, whose monopoly powers were attacked by president Theodore Roosevelt, the subject of a previous Hawley book.“Theodore Roosevelt had balked at the monopolies of his day that had consolidated power and crowded out the common man, but the the robber barons’ power over everyday Americans was nothing compared to was nothing compared to that wielded by Big Tech,” Hawley writes.But according to Senate financial disclosures the senator’s disdain for big tech does not extend to his investment portfolio.Hawley and his wife each have somewhere between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in Vanguard Growth Index Fund ETF which has holdings in Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. The disclosures don’t offer exact amounts of holdings, only a range.The Hawleys held considerably more cash in Vanguard funds in 2018, according to his disclosures. The couple held between $50,001 and $100,000 in Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF, between $50,001 and $100,000 in Vanguard Growth ETF and another $50,001 to $100,000 in Vanguard Value ETF.Hawley is a long-time critic of tech power. Before taking his seat in the Senate in 2019 he was Missouri’s attorney general and opened investigations into Facebook, Google and Uber.It’s not unusual for senators to have mutual funds while serving in Congress or for lawmakers to have investments in individual stocks. But it’s a counterintuitive decision for Hawley. The Missouri senator, educated at Stanford University and Yale Law School, has made fighting “big tech” one of his signature issues. He’s also been mentioned as a potential 2024 presidential candidate. Hawley is one of a number of young Republican senators who have prioritized rebranding the Republican party as a nemesis of big tech, China and aspiring populist champion of the American working class.Hawley drew criticism for leading the charge of congressional lawmakers in early January seeking to challenge Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections. That push incited a violent riot at the Capitol where Trump supporters broke into Congress.In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for Hawley said: “The Hawleys don’t own any stock. They have their savings in mutual funds. Some politicians enrich their families by landing them board seats on Ukrainian oil and gas companies and multi-million dollar salaries but the liberal media insists that isn’t newsworthy. But if you’re a Republican, just investing in mutual funds – just like millions of hardworking Americans do – is considered controversial.”The disclosures also show that Hawley is invested in another of his persistent targets: China.Hawley has between $1,000 and $15,000 invested in iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF, holds stakes in some of China’s biggest companies including Alibaba, Ping An Insurance group and Tencent.According to the New York Times Alibaba’s cloud computing business showed its clients how they could use its software to detect the faces of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities currently being persecuted in the country.Last year Hawley launched an attack on China, claiming “imperialist China seeks to remake the world in its own image, and to bend the global economy to its own will”.“For decades now, China has bent, and abused, and broken the rules of the international economic system to its own benefit,” he said in a Senate speech.“They have stolen our intellectual property and forced our companies to transfer sensitive trade secrets and technology. They have manipulated their currency and cheated time and again on their trade commitments. They have been complicit in the trafficking of persons and relied upon the forced labor of religious minorities,” he said. More

With summer around the corner, Americans are desperate for some sense of normalcy as the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine continues. Some businesses and lawmakers believe they have a simple solution that will allow people to gather in larger numbers again: vaccine passports.But as with so many issues in the US these days, it’s an idea dividing America.Vaccine passport supporters see a future where people would have an app on their phone that would include their vaccine information, similar to the paper record card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that is given when a person is vaccinated. People would flash the app when entering a large venue for something like a concert or sports game.While many other countries have implemented or are considering vaccine passports, in a country where political divides have determined belief in mask usage, social distancing and even the lethality of the virus, it comes as no surprise that there is already a political divide over whether vaccine passports should be used at all.Leaders of some Democratic states have embraced the idea of vaccine passports at big events like concerts and weddings.New York launched its Excelsior Pass with IBM in late March with the intention of having the app used at theaters, sports stadiums and event venues. California health officials will allow venues that verify whether someone has gotten the vaccine or tested negative to hold larger events. Hawaii is working with multiple companies on a vaccine passport system that would allow travelers to bypass Covid-19 testing and quarantine requirements if vaccinated.“Businesses have lost a lot of money during this whole period here so there’s a lot to recoup,” Mufi Hannemann, president and chief executive of the Hawaii Tourism and Lodging Association, told local news station Hawaii News Now. “We’re anxious to get this economy moving forward in a safe and healthy manner.”On the flip side, a growing number of states are passing laws banning vaccine passports, citing concerns of privacy and intrusion on people’s decisions to get vaccinated.“Government should not require any Texas to show proof of vaccination and reveal private health information just to go about their daily lives,” said Governor Greg Abbott, who ordered that no government agency or institution receiving government funding should require proof of vaccination.The governors of Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, Arizona and Indiana have passed or voiced support for similar laws.Splits have already taken place. Norwegian Cruise Line, for example, told the CDC it would be willing to require passengers be fully vaccinated before boarding, but Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said his ban on vaccine passports prohibits such a mandate.Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, like many colleges and universities, said they would require students to be vaccinated before returning to campus in the fall, but the school is considering backtracking the policy following DeSantis’s order.Though conservative figures like Donald Trump Jr, who called vaccine passports “invasive”, have started to broadly attack Democrats for backing vaccine passports, the White House has made it clear the federal government has no plans to release a vaccine passport, or require mandatory vaccines.“The government is not now nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential,” said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary, earlier in April.Psaki said the White House would release guidance for businesses and local governments who wish to implement vaccine passports.Vaccine passports have historically been used when crossing country borders. For example, some countries, including Brazil and Ghana, require people to have the vaccine against yellow fever before entering their countries. And while vaccine passports have not been used widely domestically in the US, vaccine mandates, and the proof of vaccines needed to carry them out, are common. Many schools require students to get a host of vaccines, while many healthcare systems often require the annual flu vaccine for employers.Sensitivity around a vaccine passport is probably an offshoot of a broader vaccine hesitancy. Recent polling has shown that vaccine skepticism has a partisan bent: 30% of Republicans said they would not get the vaccine versus 11% of Democrats, according to the Covid States Project. David Lazer, professor of political science at Northeastern University and a researcher with the Covid States Project, said “partisan divides on behaviors and policies have been acute throughout the pandemic”, but Democrats and Republicans are more evenly split on vaccines compared with other policies against Covid-19, like mask-wearing and social distancing.The term “passport” could also be turning people away from the concept, said Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist with Columbia University, as it implies that verification requires more personal information beyond vaccination status. A recent poll from the de Beaumont Foundation confirmed this, with Republican respondents being more supportive of vaccine “verification” over a “passport”.Miller said the World Health Organization, which is developing its own Smart Vaccine Certificate and standards for vaccine verification programs, has been adamant about making the distinction between a certificate and a passport.“A passport contains a lot of personal information, and a vaccine certificate does not,” Miller said. “It contains only the information necessary to convey the fact that the person has been vaccinated.”Other groups including the Vaccine Credential Initiative and the Covid-19 Credential Initiative are working on coming up with standards for digital vaccine passports with the aim of building trust in vaccine verification programs.Miller said the ultimate goal would be to reach herd immunity in the US, which would nix the need for vaccine passports but would require working through the skepticism that exists in the country.“People are not going to feel comfortable in large numbers, in social environments until we hit a kind of herd immunity, where, when you bump into someone, the risk of an infectious person bumping into someone who’s susceptible is decreased tremendously,” Miller said. 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